I found myself plunging in all my efforts to bring out a good appreciation for the Keralite festival of Onam at my work place in Infosys. We, a group of malayalees put our head together to come up with an attractive onam 'pookalam' (flower carpet) and we agreed on the idea of a Mohiniyattam dancer placed comfortably in a typical 'mudra' gesture on the middle of a colourful rainbow of flowers.The full completion of this wonderful flower carpet demanded lot of efforts - buying sufficient flowers from city, getting valuable petals out of flowers spending enough manual labour, late night drawing of the mohiniyattam dancer picture, running for chopping plates for beetroot so that it could used to border the picture, laying of different coloured flowers exactly in the drawn design enclosures, cleaning floor after flowering, lighting lamps, etc
The flower carpet competition was held between teams in various office buildings of infosys, and it was a great feeling to work hard towards completing it on time. Though we didn't bag any prize for our pookalam, we knew we had a good onam at office with our pookalam being watched with smile by everybody around.
2 comments:
happpy Onam to all of you!
I think you enjoyed the whole thing...where are you in the picture? Even we had a competition at college, I didn't have the pateince to participate but I took a good look at what other people had done. My! You keralites do a fantastic job with all those flowers! I wonder how you do it, it does take some skill.
yeah, we had a good time doing the entire thing, it brought in me the full consciousness of a team effort. We started by discussing about a design and i suggested a theme based pookalam with kathakali/mohiniyattam/mahabali would look better and that's how i got a picture of mohiniyattam dancer and sketched it in the middle. Couple of us including me stayed back late night to finish the drawing on chart paper. Few others started chopping flowers. Next day morning we started putting the flowers in the design columns and you can see me in the photo (Red Shirt) bordering the figure. In the end everybody was happy because it was a treat for eyes especially when viewed from top floor straight down.. but there was little disappointment as we didnot win any prizes in the competition.
Post a Comment